


oh, songbird

by summerhuntresses



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Fantasy, Gen, Mythology - Freeform, Steampunk, honestly this is just an odd steampunk mythology rewrite, i might revisit this later but for now it's complete, sort of experimental prose style too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-22 23:44:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17069459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerhuntresses/pseuds/summerhuntresses
Summary: There is a castle on a hill, and in that castle is a girl who never leaves.But she wants to.





	oh, songbird

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this as an entry into ploughshares fiction contest. since it didn't win THOUGH IT SHOULD HAVE i get to post it here. validate me.

There is a castle on a hill.

Water surrounds the castle, water and jagged rocks that jut to the sky.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say-

There is a castle that sits on a crag of rock in the middle of the sea, with only the waves and the bravest of the birds to see it.

There are people, of course. This castle was built for a reason.

If you asked one of the residents, they would tell you _there is no safer place in the world_ and _the only dangers we face here are the storms_ and _the king is wise oh he is so wise we are lucky to have him_.

If you asked the king, he would say _no one would attack a castle surrounded by rocks and reefs on all sides_ and _I had a duty to my people to protect them_ and _I must do all I can to keep my daughter safe_.

If you asked the king’s daughter, she would answer _hubris_ and _fear_ and _selfishness_.

Of course, you would not ask the king’s daughter.

The castle is not entirely cut off from the world; there is a port, and many merchant vessels dock here.

Not much food can be grown in solid rock, and there is not enough space for livestock. The people of the castle rely on trade to survive, trade brought to them by ships and merchants from the outside world.

They have quite a bit of spare time, without the need to raise their own food. Time is precious and powerful, even in the wrong hands, and the king chose his people well. There are artists and metalworkers and poets and scribes, but what the king is most proud of are his scientists.

The castle on the rock is filled to the brim with knowledge, quite literally. The library stretches from the ground to the sky, soaring over the sea and constantly growing.

(Not on its own, of course. This is not that kind of story.)

As the castle’s knowledge grows, the king’s architects and engineers expand the library so it can contain it all. The result is the most magnificent tower - the most magnificent _library_ \- in all the land, and pilgrims of knowledge come from far and wide to see it.

Very few are allowed in; the king is wise, and cautious, and guards his knowledge jealously.

But that is not the only thing he guards.

At the very top of the tower there is a room. Not a large room, to be sure. The nature of this room is such that as the tower grows, the room follows, cleverly anchored to its peak.

In the room there lives a girl.

This girl is not extraordinary - she is not inhumanly beautiful, and neither is she touched by the gods. She cannot bewitch a person with only her voice, and there are very few suitors fighting for her hand.

None, in fact. The girl is not a social animal, and the few times she makes the effort, she is not the most charming of girls.

What she is, however, is brilliant.

She lives at the top of the tower - at the top of the _library_ \- and she reads, and she learns, and she creates.

The girl is the greatest of the king’s scientists. _Her hands make miracles_ , that is what the castlefolk say, and they are not entirely wrong.

From her hands spring wolves made from steel; fierce and loyal and twisted from the earth into her own design.

She forges strong iron bulls, beasts of burden that can carry many times what a flesh and blood creature could, and dainty electrum cats that twine around the ankles of the castlefolk until the line between flesh and metal is blurred to nothing.

But her greatest creations, the ones that leave the castlefolk in awe, are her birds.

Songbirds fashioned from gold, sweet music ringing from copper throats.

Hunting birds knapped from obsidian, their swift bodies bound together with deft twists of dark iron.

Even seabirds, gulls woven from bronze and alloyed titanium, swooping over the open ocean and catching fish to bring back.

No one knows how her birds take flight, and no one is willing to venture up the tower to ask.

To do so would be to risk the king’s wrath.

The girl, you see, is his daughter.

If you asked him, the king would tell you _she is my most precious treasure_ and _all I do I do for her_ and _I have to keep her_ safe.

If you asked her…

Well.

You would not ask her.

She sits in her room at the top of the tower, and she reads, and she learns, and she creates.

She does not venture down to the ground.

When she was younger she tried, of course. Children are curious and want to explore, and she was a curious child indeed.

The tower was smaller, then.

She was a child and she wanted a friend, but all she found was deference. The castlefolk feared her father, and because of that they feared her too.

That fear hurt her, deep in her soul. They were polite, of course, perfectly willing to speak with the king’s daughter, but they never forgot who they were speaking to. They bowed, and smiled, and greeted her as _princess_ and _my lady_ and _your grace_ (but never by name) and each and every time she remembered that they only spoke to her for fear of her father.

Still she kept exploring, finding new places and new people each day. She told herself that she would speak to every single person in the castle and find the one who would see her for herself.

(Existing as simply a concept in the minds of everyone you meet is exhausting, she had learned.)

Weeks passed, and with them months. Seasons changed and she grew older, still hoping to find a single person who would call her by her name.

Her thirteenth nameday came and went, celebrated by all the castlefolk. The girl hid in the cellar with a stolen honey cake and a treatise on the chemical properties of iron. No one realized her absence, all assuming she had different and grander plans than theirs.

(There was a merchant girl, once. She smiled, and spoke to the girl, and didn’t fear her father. There was a merchant girl, but the problem with merchants is that they _leave_.)

(She wishes she could leave, sometimes.)

By the time she is fifteen she has spoken to every single person in the castle. Not a single one has used her name. Her father tries to comfort her, saying _they are only peasants, they do not understand your brilliance, you are so much more than them._

She returns to her tower that night, to the _library_ , and she does not leave.

Years pass.

The tower grows.

She stays in her tower, watches as the ground gets farther and farther away, and she brings metal to life.

The castlefolk see this, and they marvel. _Witch_ , they call her, _sorceress, she who commands the earth to bend_. They do not call her _king’s_ _daughter_ any longer, but then she would not know that, would she?

She breathes life into metal and she wonders what it feels like-

what _life_ feels like.

Her father the king is pleased with her work. How could he not be, when his daughter works miracles in his domain? He does not enter the library. A king has much to do, and there is no time for him to waste on books.

It does not occur to him that his daughter is in the library. It does not occur to him that she is alone.

The girl does not spend _all_ of her time in her room. That would be silly. She lives in a library after all, the greatest library in the world. She walks among the shelves, reads book after book after book, learns to refine her work more than she ever thought possible.

The castlefolk, if they see her amongst the shelves, do not speak to her. Perhaps they think they are doing her a service, that she would prefer to be undisturbed, or perhaps they merely fear her still; she does not know.

She is not guarded, of course. Why would she be guarded, in the castle on the rock? Who would she need guarding _from?_ The only people in the castle on the rock are those who the king allows to be there.

And the king would never allow her to be harmed.

(She never thinks about how even being guarded night and day would be preferable to this constant, neverending solitude, for at least a guard might speak to her.)

(This is a lie.)

As time passes and the girl grows older, her spark begins to dim. She still weaves her creatures from metal, still breathes life into them, but they dim as well, forged from iron and built for work. The cats grow less plentiful, and the bulls less ornate.

There are no more songbirds.

The castlefolk whisper - of course they notice the change, how could they not - but they do nothing more than whisper. The girl is barely more than a legend to them by now; she is a flicker in the corner of their eye, a shadow passing through the library.

Her creations still roam the castle, but they have been there forever, without a beginning or an end. They merely exist.

(Like her.)

Her gaze has turned inwards, no longer gazing to the stars and dreaming. She looks at the ground, sees the castlefolk there, and resigns herself to solitude.

Once upon a time a little girl imagined what it would be like to fly; she stretched her hands out to meet the glittering songbirds that circled her tower and felt them soar through empty space, held up by nothing but their wings and their will.

The longing to fly was fierce and all-consuming. To soar with her gulls, dive with her raptors, dance with her songbirds.

A messenger had interrupted her daydreaming, then, with a requisition form from the stone workers on the ground. She had gone back to work and pushed the dream from her mind.

Her shoulders itched for days.

Now the girl was three and twenty, an adult in both body and mind. The passion had faded from her creatures; they did their jobs and moved like beasts, but it was easy to tell that they were metal instead of flesh.

The castlefolk whisper about it in secret. They had quickly grown to love the quirks and foibles of the creatures, how one of the electrum cats would knock the paintings askew while another of the bronze gulls roosted in the rafters, refusing to leave unless forced to.

Those creatures, the early ones, had had names, individuality, personality, but no more. As the girl lost her spark, so too did her creatures.

The dreams have returned to her. Her days are filled with thoughts of flight, of sprouting wings like the songbirds of her childhood and simply falling off the tower. No longer the dreams of an artist, these are the dreams of a girl without hope, one forced to grow up too soon.

She dreams, and as she dreams she despairs.

Her father the king is pleased with her work but concerned all the same; even he, with all his distance, has noticed the change in the creatures roaming the castle. A dinner invitation is sent, one that she accepts after a great deal of thought. It has been so long since she had left the tower, after all, and even longer since she had interacted freely with the castlefolk.

Would they remember? Would they recognize her face, or think her merely one of the travellers who came to visit the great library?

She does not know, and in that uncertainty she finds fear. But her father the king requests her presence, and, after all, he is the king.

She leaves her tower and ventures down to the ground for the first time in - _decades? centuries? lifetimes?_ \- years.

The castlefolk do not recognize her.

Dinner is- fine. It is fine. Her father marvels at her beauty, asks after her work, says _we do not see you as often as we would like_ and she does not know if he is speaking of the castlefolk or if he merely means himself the king. She does not ask.

When he asks after the songbirds, she tells him _I am an adult now_ and _there are responsibilities I must fulfill_ and _I do not have time for childish fancies_.

Her return to the tower is quiet but long, winding around courtyards and through corridors she vaguely remembers, soft and faintly lit as if she was walking through a dream. A man runs past her, laughing merrily.

The sound of his laughter echoes for a long time. Scant seconds later a woman races up to her and asks after him, her words rushed and breathless from running and laughter. The girl from the tower stumbles over her words, taken aback.

She does not notice the woman leave.

It startles her, having that much contact with someone, and that surprise is a shock in and of itself. She has been alone for so long, so many days and months and years of solitude.

She remembers the merchant’s daughter, then. Tall and dark, flowers braided through her hair and hands roughened by years of hard work, she had been the most beautiful thing the girl had ever seen.

Her laughter, though, had stuck in the girl’s mind not because of its beauty - the merchant’s daughter had been thirteen, wild and unrefined, and her laughter had been the same - but because the merchant’s daughter had been willing to laugh with the daughter of the king. There had been no duty, no fear, no fealty. There had only been two girls who had laughed together.

For a instant the girl thinks of the future, of what it could have been.

She imagines _laughter_ _and warmth and freedom_ and it hurts, hurts her to realize that that is not hers to have. All there is is her duty and her tower, climbing ever higher away from the ground.

There are tears in her eyes but before they can fall she hears a noise, far down the long hall.

She is a scientist, and her curiosity is peaked. The hall is long and full of hiding places, and she very nearly gives up. As she turns away, however, she hears the noise again, metal scraping on stone and a faint animal noise. A glint of gold catches her eye and she turns.

There is a songbird in the wall.

One of her songbirds, golden wings and copper throat, dust covering it as though it had lain silent for years upon years. It wriggles faintly, beak opening and closing as though it is trying to sing. One wing brushes against the stone wall, scraping gently as the tiniest chirp makes it out of its throat.

She has no idea how long it has lain here, silent and still, as lifeless as any statue in any hall in the castle. So too does she not know why it has woken now.

(This is a lie.)

Gently, oh so very gently, she takes it from the wall, cradling it to her breast as she hurries back to her workshop.

(She does not think of the tower’s height now.)

The songbird is very nearly a ruin, twisted by time and neglect until it is little more than a lump of metal and wax. She sets to work anyway, deft hands dancing as they have not in years.

The sun rises. The gulls cry. The songbird is repaired.

Sweet music rings from its throat, as cheerful and pure as the day it was forged.

The girl sits back from her workbench, stares in awe as the songbird takes flight. It circles the room, singing all the while, golden wings bearing it easily through the air. She is mesmerized, watching it sing and fly and fly and sing.

It flutters past her, grazes her hair with one golden wing, and makes for the window, the blue sky outside calling to it. Singing still, it soars towards it- and bounces off.

The songbird is not stunned; it is not alive, it cannot feel pain. It merely flutters back up and tries again, the crack of metal against glass sharp and jarring to her ears. The girl stands frozen, watching as the songbird collides with the glass once, twice, thrice.

As the songbird rises for a fourth attempt, the girl shakes herself from her stupor. She rushes to the window, quickly opening it and allowing the songbird to escape. She does not close the window immediately, though. She leans outside instead, turning her face to the sun and basking in its warmth for long moments.

Then she looks down.

The ground is a dizzying distance away, hundreds and hundreds of meters down. The castlefolk are mere dots, ants scurrying along with their little errands in their little lives. Her stomach drops, but she is not afraid of falling. She never has been.

She stares at the ground for a moment longer, turns her gaze to the ocean, and ducks back into her workshop.

She does not close the window.

Three days later, Icarus climbs from her high, high windowsill, wings of iron and gold strapped to her back.

(Her wings are not wax.)

(She does not fall.)


End file.
